So I can’t resist commenting on a Washington Poststory about the tax implications of the upcoming wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

It may seem like a modern fairy tale, but the upcoming wedding of Britain’s Prince Harry to American actress Meghan Markle will come with some mundane hurdles. Perhaps most inconveniently for the British royals, this transatlantic partnership could end up involving the United States’ Internal Revenue Service.

Most readers probably wonder how and why the IRS will be involved. After all, Ms. Markle no longer will be living in the United States or earning income in the United States after she marries the Prince.

But here’s the bad news (for the millions of Americans who live overseas, not just Ms. Markle): The United States imposes “worldwide taxation,” which means the IRS claims the right to tax all income earned by citizens, even if those citizens live overseas and earn all their income outside of America.

…there already has been widespread speculation that the union of Prince Harry and Markle eventually could result in some British royal children wielding American passports. But there’s a big obstacle in the way: American tax laws. …The United States’ citizenship-based taxation system is unusual: Only Eritrea has a similar system. It’s a relic of the Civil War and the Revenue Act of 1862, which called for the taxing of U.S. citizens abroad.

Here’s what this means for the royal family.

Markle’s American citizenship could open up the secretive finances of the royal family to outside scrutiny. If she remains a U.S. citizen, Markle will have to file her taxes to the IRS every year. And if she has more than $300,000 in assets at any point during the tax year — a likely scenario, given her successful acting career and her future husband — she will be expected to annually file a document called Form 8938 that will reveal the detail of these assets, which could include foreign trusts. …Although Markle’s tax information would not become public once sent to the United States, it would leave the royal family open not only to IRS review but also the risk that the information could leak, said Dianne Mehany, a tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale.

So what’s the solution if the royal family wants to avoid the greedy and intrusive IRS?

…the royal family employs some of the country’s best tax consultants. …”My guess is that she’ll be pressured by the Royal family to renounce [her U.S. citizenship], even if she’d rather not,” Spiro added. In many ways, that solution may be the simplest. And if Markle does give up her citizenship, she won’t be alone. Treasury Department data show that 5,411 people chose to expatriate in 2016 — a 26 percent year-over-year increase and potentially a historic high — and experts expect that number to keep rising because of the increasing tax burdens placed on U.S. citizens living abroad.

And it’s embarrassing to acknowledge that the United States has a very barbaric practice (used by evil regimes such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) of extorting funds from Americas who are forced to give up citizenship.

She…would be subject to a potentially considerable exit tax.

This is adding injury to injury.

But Ms. Markle can be comforted by the fact that she’s not an outlier. Because of America’s bad worldwide tax regime (and especially because of FATCA, which makes enforcement of that bad system especially painful), an ever-growing number of overseas Americans have been forced to give up their citizenship.

Maybe as a wedding present to Prince Harry, American politicians can junk America’s terrible worldwide tax regime. That doesn’t require dramatic change, but why not fix a bunch of problems at once? I’ll simply point out that the flat tax is based on the common-sense approach of territorial taxation (governments only tax economic activity inside national borders).

Unfortunately, the GOP isn’t planning to completely fix these policies, largely because there’s no commitment to control government spending. But any shift toward better tax policy will be good for the nation.

Another goal to add to the above list is that Republicans want to create a level playing field for American-based firms by replacing “worldwide taxation” of business income with “territorial taxation” of business income.

For those who have wisely avoided the topic of international business taxation, here’s all you need to know: Worldwide taxation means a company that earns income in another country is taxed both by the government where the income is earned and by the government back home. Territorial taxation, by contrast, is simply the common-sense notion that income is taxed only by the government where the income is earned.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, two authors explain how America’s anti-competitive system of worldwide taxation undermines U.S.-domiciled companies.

…earlier this month Iconix , the U.S.-based company that owns the rights to Charles Schulz’s comic characters, announced it will sell them to Canada’s DHX Media. That makes Charlie Brown America’s latest expatriate. It’s a clear signal that U.S. corporate taxes are nudging business elsewhere. …why? In part because the U.S. corporate tax system hampers U.S.-based businesses by subjecting them to world-wide taxation. Canada’s aggregate corporate taxes are about 10 percentage points lower. …America’s high corporate tax rate and its practice of taxing international income is out of step with the rest of the world. The solution is so clear even a cartoon character should grasp it: Cut tax rates and adopt a system for taxing international income that more closely resembles those used by the country’s international competitors.

Simply stated, American-domiciled multinationals have a big competitive disadvantage compared to their foreign rivals. So it’s understandable that many of them try to protect shareholders, workers, and consumers by arranging (usually through a merger) to become foreign companies.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the Republican tax reform plan ostensibly will shift America to a territorial tax system. As explained above, this is the sensible notion of letting other nations tax income earned inside their borders while the IRS would tax the income earned by companies in the United States.

This would be good for competitiveness, particularly since the United States is one of only a handful of nations that impose a worldwide tax burden on domestic firms.

But not everybody likes the idea of territorial taxation.

One reason for opposition is that some people see corporations primarily as sources of tax revenue. So when there are discussions of international tax, their mindset is nations should compete on grabbing the most money. I’m not joking.

European Union regulators’ tax crackdown on Amazon.com Inc. — like the EU’s case against Apple Inc. — should spur U.S. policy makers to address companies’ aggressive offshore tax-avoidance strategies before it’s too late, experts said. …“Really, what we are seeing is a race by the different taxing jurisdictions to claim a share of the tax prize represented by the largely untaxed streams of income that U.S. multinationals have engineered for themselves,’’ said Ed Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California and the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “If the United States doesn’t join the race, it will just lose tax revenue to more aggressive host countries around the world.’’ The EU rulings “do make it clear that if we are not interested in protecting our corporate tax base, other countries will be more than happy to tax the income,’’ said Kimberly Clausing, a professor of economics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Call me crazy, but I think American policymakers should be in a race to create jobs, boost investment, and increase wages. And that means doing the opposite of what these supposed experts want.

Unsurprisingly, left-wing groups also are opposed to territorial taxation. Here are some passages from a report published by the Hill.

One hundred organizations, including a number of progressive groups and labor unions, are urging Congress to reject a major international tax change proposed in Republicans’ framework for a tax overhaul. In a letter dated Monday, the groups speak out against the framework’s move toward a “territorial” tax system that would largely exempt American companies’ foreign profits from U.S. tax. …”Ending taxation of offshore profits would give multinational corporations an incentive to send jobs offshore, thereby lowering U.S. wages,” they wrote.

Both assertions in that excerpt are wrong and/or misleading.

First, territorial taxation doesn’t mean that profits are exempt from tax. It simply means that the IRS doesn’t impose an additional layer of tax on income that already has been subject to the tax system of another country.

Worldwide taxation is not the way to fix that bias since foreign-domiciled companies wouldn’t be impacted and they easily can sell into the American market.

By the way, the Republican tax plan doesn’t even create a real territorial tax system. Returning to the Bloomberg story cited above, the GOP proposal basically copies a very bad idea that was being pushed a few years ago by the Obama Administration.

To be fair, the Republican approach is less punitive that what Obama wanted.

Nonetheless, I worry that if Republicans adopt some sort of global minimum tax, it will just be a matter of time before that rate increases. In which case a shift toward territoriality actually plants a seed for a more onerous worldwide system!

Without knowing what will happen in the future, there’s no right or wrong answer, but I’m wondering whether the smart approach is to simply leave the current system in place. Yet, it’s based on worldwide taxation, but at least companies have deferral, which creates de facto territoriality for firms that manage their affairs astutely.

Interestingly, it appears that Trump pays a lot of tax. At least for that one year. Which is contrary to what a lot of people have suspected – including me in the column I wrote on this topic last year for Time.

Some Trump supporters are even highlighting the fact that Trump’s effective tax rate that year was higher than what’s been paid by other political figures in more recent years.

But I’m not impressed. First, we have no idea what Trump’s tax rate was in other years. So the people defending Trump on that basis may wind up with egg on their face if tax returns from other years ever get published.

Second, why is it a good thing that Trump paid so much tax? I realize I’m a curmudgeonly libertarian, but I was one of the people who applauded Trump for saying that he does everything possible to minimize the amount of money he turns over to the IRS. As far as I’m concerned, he failed in 2005.

But let’s set politics aside and focus on the fact that Trump coughed up $38 million to the IRS in 2005. If that’s representative of what he pays every year (and I realize that’s a big “if”), my main thought is that he should move to Italy.

Yes, I realize that sounds crazy given Italy’s awful fiscal system and grim outlook. But there’s actually a new special tax regime to lure wealthy foreigners. Regardless of their income, rich people who move to Italy from other nations can pay a flat amount of €100,000 every year. Note that we’re talking about a flat amount, not a flat rate.

Italy on Wednesday (Mar 8) introduced a flat tax for wealthy foreigners in a bid to compete with similar incentives offered in Britain and Spain, which have successfully attracted a slew of rich footballers and entertainers. The new flat rate tax of €100,000 (US$105,000) a year will apply to all worldwide income for foreigners who declare Italy to be their residency for tax purposes.

Italy unveiled a plan to allow the ultra-wealthy willing to take up residency in the country to pay an annual “flat tax” of 100,000 euros ($105,000) regardless of their level of income. A former Italian tax official told Bloomberg BNA the initiative is an attempt to entice high-net-worth individuals based in the U.K. to set up residency in Italy… Individuals paying the flat tax can add family members for an additional 25,000 euros ($26,250) each. The local media speculated that the measure would attract at least 1,000 high-income individuals.

Think about this from Donald Trump’s perspective. Would he rather pay $38 million to the ghouls at the IRS, or would he rather make an annual payment of €100,000 (plus another €50,000 for his wife and youngest son) to the Agenzia Entrate?

Seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since Italy is one of the most beautiful nations in the world. Like France, it’s not a place where it’s easy to become rich, but it’s a great place to live if you already have money.

But if Trump prefers cold rain over Mediterranean sunshine, he could also pick the Isle of Man for his new home.

There are no capital gains, inheritance tax or stamp duty, and personal income tax has a 10% standard rate and 20% higher rate. In addition there is a tax cap on total income payable of £125,000 per person, which has encouraged a steady flow of wealthy individuals and families to settle on the Island.

Though there are other options, as David Schrieberg explained for Forbes.

Italy is not exactly breaking new ground here. Various countries including Portugal, Malta, Cyprus and Ireland have been chasing high net worth individuals with various incentives. In 2014, some 60% of Swiss voters rejected a Socialist Party bid to end a 152-year-old tax break through which an estimated 5,600 wealthy foreigners pay a single lump sum similar to the new Italian regime.

If you think all of this sounds too good to be true, you’re right. At least for Donald Trump and other Americans. The United States has a very onerous worldwide tax system based on citizenship.

In other words, unlike folks in the rest of the world, Americans have to give up their passports in order to benefit from these attractive options. And the IRS insists that such people pay a Soviet-style exit tax on their way out the door.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is an odious law enacted back in 2010 when the left controlled all the levers of power. It’s horrible legislation that threatens the rest of the world with financial protectionism (a 30 percent levy on all money flowing out of the United States) unless foreign governments and foreign financial institutions agree to serve as deputy tax collectors for America’s anti-competitive worldwide tax system.

I guess time will tell, but if the goal is good policy (and keeping promises), this law deserves to be tossed in the trash.

I’ve previously explained that FATCA is so brutal that it has led many overseas Americans to give up their citizenship simply because FATCA made their lives miserable. They couldn’t open bank accounts. They had trouble finding places to manage their investments. Even retirement accounts became a nightmare.

Some people said that these difficulties were just temporary and would disappear once everyone learned how the law operated.

Hardly. Let’s start with some data from a Bloomberg story that should be a wake-up call for the crowd in Washington.

The number of Americans renouncing their citizenship rose to a new record of 5,411 last year, up 26 percent from 2015, according to the latest government data. …Since Fatca came into being, annual totals for Americans renouncing citizenship have reached their four highest historic levels.

…the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) became law in 2010 to go after fat cats stashing money abroad, these pages have reported that it has led the IRS to treat law-abiding Americans as criminals. …Under Fatca, Americans must now report overseas holdings of more than $50,000 even if they owe no taxes, or else face crushing fines. For foreign financial institutions, the penalty for not giving the IRS what it wants to know about their American clients is a 30% withholding penalty on any U.S.-sourced payment to these institutions. …With the GOP controlling Congress and White House, the time is ripe for Republicans to make good on their pledge and give Fatca the heave-ho.

Amazingly, even the “taxpayer advocate” at the IRS recognizes the law is a disgrace, reversing the presumption of innocence in the Constitution.

The IRS has adopted an enforcement-oriented regime with respect to international taxpayers. Its operative assumption appears to be that all such taxpayers should be suspected of fraudulent activity, unless proven otherwise.

This is a remarkable development. I’ve groused before that the IRS’s taxpayer advocate has a bad habit of advocating for the IRS rather than the American people, so FATCA must be really bad to generate a report that actually defends the rights of taxpayers.

It’s also bad news for financial institutions.

An article in the Economist has some very remarkable admissions, including the fact that compliance costs will be at least twice as high as the tax revenue that ostensibly is being generated.

FATCA’s intrusiveness has caused concern among banks and fund managers. It raises big questions about data privacy. Compliance costs, mostly borne overseas, are likely to be at least double the revenue that the law will generate for America. The necessary overhauls of systems and procedures and the extra digging around to identify American clients could add $100m or more to a large bank’s administrative costs. No wonder bankers have dubbed FATCA the Fear And Total Confusion Act. An OECD tax official describes the law as “awful, in a way, like a nuclear bomb” but also sees it as “a remarkable leap forward for transparency”. …A further concern is the risk of misuse of information by corrupt administrations, or rogue government employees, such as the sale of personal financial data to would-be kidnappers.

Let’s now focus on how the law is an attack on the sovereignty of other nations (and how it creates a precedent that will be used to attack America’s fiscal sovereignty).

Some leftists justify this wretched law by saying it only targets so-called tax havens. But Trinidad and Tobago is hardly in that category. Yet because FATCA applies to the entire world, a senior official in that country very much hopes Trump will follow through on promises in the Republican platform to repeal the misguided legislation.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the leader of the opposition coalition in parliament, recently…discovered that the GOP had called for repeal of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, which is best understood as a license for IRS imperialism. …Mrs. Persad-Bissessar wrote Donald Trump in January asking if he will keep this promise. …Mrs. Persad-Bissessar, a former prime minister, wants to know because the Trinidad and Tobago parliament is now considering changing the nation’s laws to accommodate Fatca.

Repeal would be good for T&T, but it also would be good for the USA.

Americans have an even bigger stake in the answer. …the law has become another example of gross federal overreach, adding another burden on Americans overseas who are already paying taxes where they live. The 2010 law has almost no parallel anywhere, for good reason. While most nations limit their taxes to income earned within their borders, the U.S. is among the smaller group of nations that taxes its citizens on global income. …The roughly eight million Americans working overseas have been hit hardest by this bad law. Some foreign banks and financial institutions have responded simply by refusing to take American customers, on grounds that Fatca requirements are more trouble than the business is worth. For similar reasons others do not want Americans as business partners. Many others of modest means who owe no U.S. taxes can still find themselves hit by hefty fines and penalties because they have fallen afoul of the reporting requirements.

Heck, even if the law isn’t repealed, Trump can defang it.

…the whole Fatca edifice has been built on the intergovernmental agreements that Treasury has negotiated with more than 100 countries—agreements for which there is no statutory authority or Congressional ratification. Mr. Trump could take the teeth out of Fatca by announcing he has suspended negotiations for future agreements and won’t enforce the ones we have. …Let’s hope President Trump gives the answer that Americans deserve, by making clear he intends to deliver on the GOP pledge to dismantle a bad law that never should have been passed.

Amen.

The law is also running into problems in Israel, another nation that hardly fits the “tax haven” definition. A Forbes columnist has a dismal assessment of this intrusive and destructive law.

…the Israeli High Court’s temporary injunction against the enforcement of America’s controversial global tax law FATCA should serve as “a wake-up call” for other nations to rethink enforcing this “toxic, flawed and imperialistic legislation,” according to the boss of a leading independent financial firm that advises high-net-worth individuals (HNWI’s) and expats globally. …“Justice Meltzer’s action should be championed,” deVere’s Green asserts, who is an outspoken critic of FATCA. “His wise caution should serve as a wake-up call for other countries to rethink enforcing this toxic, flawed, damaging legislation that is being imposed on sovereign states around the world by the U.S.” …FATCA could indeed be described as a “masterclass” in fiscal imperialism and unintended consequences. But also of concern is that the US is increasingly secret in matters of financial data. It’s no wonder some have labelled it “horrific” and a nightmare for financial institutions. …Perhaps unsurprisingly there a growing trend and an overwhelming number of U.S. citizens are giving up their American citizenship (citizenship abdications), which has been revealed by the U.S. Treasury Department. And, according to a survey conducted in early 2015 by deVere itself almost three quarters (73%) of Americans living overseas expressed the view that they were tempted to relinquish their U.S. passports.

Canada also is unhappy that the U.S. is engaging in an extraterritorial revenue grab.

Some 7m Americans outside the country (1m of them in Canada), along with an unknown number of “US persons”, are now caught in FATCA’s net. …Ms Hillis is fighting back through the courts. She and Gwen Deegan, an artist who has lived in Canada since she was five, filed a suit claiming that the Canadian government’s co-operation with FATCA violates a tax treaty and constitutional protections against discrimination. …If Ms Hillis and Ms Deegan win in court, Canada’s government will face an awkward choice between complying with the decision and exposing Canadian banks to huge penalties. The Alliance for the Defence of Canadian Sovereignty, which is paying the women’s legal expenses, has harvested donations from China, Vatican City and beyond.

With an estimated 9 million Americans currently living overseas, the U.S expatriate community is comprised of a wide variety of people from all walks of life. ..The one nagging truth that is both common and unique to all of these individuals? They remain effectively fettered to the U.S. tax system. Unlike almost every other tax regime in the world, the U.S. taxes its citizens no matter where they reside. Thus, even if you expect never to return, you should expect to have to file an annual tax return. …As many expats can attest, it has become more difficult to open or maintain a bank account overseas without having to sign an IRS Form W-9 or other U.S. tax-related documentation. This increasingly common bank procedure is a result of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which requires foreign banks and other financial institutions, among other things, to gather and report information to the IRS about their U.S. customers or face stiff tax-withholding penalties on U.S. investments.

The last sentence is that excerpt deserves some attention. The FATCA law is so onerous that it is advantageous for many to simply not invest in the American economy.

And that means less growth and prosperity for the rest of us.

But that’s just part of the story.

Because the United States has imposed this awful law on the rest of the world, other nations now want to do the same thing. Indeed, the tax-aholics at the OECD have modified a Multilateral Convention and turned it into an Orwellian regime for promiscuous collection and sharing of data by almost every government. This scheme, sometimes referred to as the Global Account Tax Compliance Act because of its similarity to FATCA (I call it a nascent World Tax Organization), will boomerang on America because of the presumption that we’re obliged to change our tax and privacy laws so that foreign governments can tax investments in the United States.

If you get into the weeds of tax policy and had a contest for parts of the internal revenue code that are “boring but important,” depreciation would be at the top of the list. After all, how many people want to learn about America’s Byzantine system that imposes a discriminatory tax penalty on new investment? Yes, it’s a self-destructive policy that imposes a lot of economic damage, but even I’ll admit it’s not a riveting topic (though I tried to make it culturally relevant by using ABBA as an example).

In second place would be a policy called “deferral,” which deals with a part of the law that allows companies to delay an extra layer of tax that the IRS imposes on income that is earned – and already subject to tax – in other countries. It is “boring but important” because it has major implications on the ability of American-domiciled firms to compete for market share overseas.

Here’s a video that explains the issue, though feel free to skip it and continue reading if you already are familiar with how the law works.

The simple way to think of this eye-glazing topic is that “deferral” is a good policy that partially mitigates the impact of a bad policy known as “worldwide taxation.”

Unfortunately, good policy tends to be unpopular in Washington. This is why deferral (and related issues such as inversions, which occur for the simple reason that worldwide taxation creates a huge competitive disadvantage for U.S.-domiciled companies) is playing an unusually large role in the 2016 election and concomitant tax debates.

Apple CEO Tim Cook struck back at critics of the iPhone maker’s strategy to avoid paying U.S. taxes, telling The Washington Post in a wide ranging interview that the company would not bring that money back from abroad unless there was a “fair rate.”

Since the discussion is about income that Apple has earned in other nations (and therefore about income that already has been subject to all applicable taxes in other nations), the only “fair rate” from the United States is zero.

That’s because good tax systems are based on “territorial taxation” rather than “worldwide taxation.”

Though a worldwide tax system might not impose that much damage if a nation had a low corporate tax rate.

Unfortunately, that’s not a good description of the U.S. system, which has a very high rate, thus creating a big incentive to hold money overseas to avoid having to pay a very hefty second layer of tax to the IRS on income that already has been subject to tax by foreign governments.

Along with other multinational companies, the tech giant has been subject to criticism over a tax strategy that allows them to shelter profits made abroad from the U.S. corporate tax rate, which at 35 percent is among the highest in the developed world.

“Among”? I don’t know if this is a sign of bias or ignorance on the part of CNBC, but the U.S. unquestionably has the highest corporate tax rate among developed nations.

Anyhow, Mr. Cook points out that there’s nothing patriotic about needlessly paying extra tax to the IRS, especially when it would mean a very punitive tax rate.

…a few particularly strident critics have lambasted Apple as a tax dodger. …While some proponents of the higher U.S. tax rate say it’s unpatriotic for companies to practice inversions or shelter income, Cook hit back at the suggestion. “It is the current tax law. It’s not a matter of being patriotic or not patriotic,” Cook told The Post in a lengthy sit-down. “It doesn’t go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are.” …Cook added that “when we bring it back, we will pay 35 percent federal tax and then a weighted average across the states that we’re in, which is about 5 percent, so think of it as 40 percent. We’ve said at 40 percent, we’re not going to bring it back until there’s a fair rate. There’s no debate about it.”

Cook may be right that there’s “no debate” about whether it’s sensible for a company to keep money overseas to guard against bad tax policy.

But there is a debate about whether politicians will make the law worse in a grab for more revenue.

Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, doesn’t understand the issue. He wrote an editorial asserting that Apple is engaging in a “rip-off.”

…the heart of this mess is the big dog of tax rip-offs – tax deferral. This is the rule that encourages American multinational corporations to keep their profits overseas instead of investing them here at home, and it does so by granting them $80 billion a year in tax breaks. This policy…defies common sense. …some of the most profitable companies in the world can put off paying taxes indefinitely while hardworking Americans must pay their taxes every year. …that system creates a perverse incentive to keep corporate profits overseas instead of investing here at home.

I agree with him that the current system creates a perverse incentive to keep money abroad.

But you don’t solve that problem by imposing unconstrained worldwide taxation, which would create a perverse incentive structure that discourages American-domiciled firms from competing for market share in other nations.

Amazingly, Senator Wyden actually claims that making the system more punitive would help make America a better place to do business.

…ending deferral is a necessary step in making sure…the U.S. maintains its position as the best place to do business.

Though I guess we need to give Wyden credit for honesty. He admits that what he really wants is for Washington to have more money to spend.

Ending deferral will also generate money from existing deferred taxes to pay for rebuilding our country’s crumbling infrastructure. …This is a priority that almost all tax reform proposals have called for.

By the way, can you guess which presidential candidate agrees with Senator Wyden and wants to impose full and immediate worldwide taxation?

If you answered Hillary Clinton, you’re right. But if you answered Donald Trump, that also would be a correct answer.

The Wall Street Journalopines on the issue and is especially unimpressed by Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible approach on the issue.

Mrs. Clinton is targeting so-called inversions, where U.S.-based companies move their headquarters by buying an overseas competitor, as well as foreign takeovers of U.S. firms for tax considerations. These migrations are the result of a U.S. corporate-tax code that supplies incentives to migrate… The Democrat would impose what she calls an “exit tax” on businesses that relocate outside the U.S., which is the sort of thing banana republics impose when their economies sour. …Mrs. Clinton wants to build a tax wall to stop Americans from escaping. “If they want to go,” she threatened in Michigan, “they’re going to have to pay to go.”

Ugh, making companies “pay to go” is an unseemly sentiment. Sort of what you might expect from a place like Venezuela where politicians treat private firms as a source of loot for their cronies.

…the U.S. taxes residents—businesses and individuals—on their world-wide income, not merely the income that they earned in the U.S. …the U.S. taxes companies headquartered in the U.S. far more than companies based in other countries. Thirty-one of the 34 OECD countries have cut corporate taxes since 2000, leaving the U.S. with the highest rate in the industrialized world. The U.S. system of world-wide taxation means that a company that moves from Dublin, Ohio, to Dublin, Ireland, will pay a rate that is less than a third of America’s. A dollar of profit earned on the Emerald Isle by an Irish-based company becomes 87.5 cents after taxes, which it can then invest in Ireland or the U.S. or somewhere else. But if the company stays in Ohio and makes the same buck in Ireland, the after-tax return drops to 65 cents or less if the money is invested in America.

But there is something even worse, a Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters that has existed for decades but recently has been dangerously modified. MCMAATM is a clunky acronym, however, so let’s go with GATCA. That’s because this agreement, along with companion arrangements, would lead to a Global Tax Compliance Act.

Let’s learn more about this bad idea, which will become binding on America if approved by the Senate.

James Jatras explains this dangerous proposal in a column for Accounting Today.

Treasury’s real agenda is…a so-called “Protocol amending the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.” The Protocol, along with a follow-up “Competent Authority” agreement, is an initiative of the G20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the support, unsurprisingly, of the Obama Administration. …the Protocol cannot be repaired. It is utterly inconsistent with any concept of American sovereignty or Americans’ constitutional protections. Ratification of the Protocol would mean acceptance by the United States as a treaty obligation of an international “common reporting standard,” which is essentially FATCA gone global—sometimes called GATCA. Ratifying the Protocol arguably would also provide Treasury with backdoor legal authority to issue regulations requiring FATCA-like reporting to foreign governments by U.S. domestic banks, credit unions, insurance companies, mutual funds, etc. This would mean billions of dollars in costs passed on to American taxpayers and consumers, as well as mandating the delivery of private data to authoritarian and corrupt governments, including China, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Nigeria.

The Foreign Relations Committee unfortunately has approved the GATCA Protocol.

…the senator is right to insist that the OECD Protocol is dead on arrival.

Taxpayers all over the world owe him their gratitude.

In a column for Investor’s Business Daily, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center warns that this pernicious and risky global pact would give the IRS power to collect and automatically share massive amounts of our sensitive financial information with some of the world’s most corrupt, venal, and incompetent governments.

During a visit to the World Bank this week, I got a sobering lesson about the degree to which the people working at international bureaucracies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, dislike tax competition. For years, these organizations — which are funded with our hard-earned tax dollars — have bullied low-tax nations into changing their tax privacy laws so uncompetitive nations can track taxpayers and companies around the world. …they never tire of trying to raise taxes on everyone else. Take the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all system of “automatic information exchange” that would necessitate the complete evisceration of financial privacy around the world. A goal of the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters is to impose a global network of data collection and dissemination to allow high-tax nations to double-tax and sometimes triple-tax economic activity worldwide. That would be a perfect tax harmonization scheme for politicians and a nightmare for taxpayers and the global economy.

But she closes with the good news.

Somehow the bureaucrats persuaded the lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to approve it. Thankfully, it’s currently being blocked by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah.

Actually, all that’s being blocked is the ability to ram the Multilateral Convention through the Senate without any debate or discussion.

John Gray explains the procedural issues in a piece for Conservative Review.

Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT)…aren’t blocking these treaties at all. Instead, they are just objecting to the Senate ratifying them by “unanimous consent.” The Senate leadership has the authority to bring these tax treaties to the floor for full consideration – debate, amendments, and votes. That is what Senators Paul and Lee are asking for. …Unanimous consent means that the process takes all of about 10 seconds; there is no time to review the treaties, there is no time for debate, and not a second of time to offer amendments. They simply want them to be expedited through the Senate without transparency. …As sitting U.S. Senators, they have the right to ask for debate and amendments to these treaties. …These treaties are dangerous to our personal liberties. Senator Paul and Senator Lee deserve the transparency and debate they’ve requested.

Amen.

For those of us who want good tax policy, rejecting this pact is vital.

An ideal fiscal system not only has a low rate, but also taxes income only one time and only taxes income earned inside national borders.

But this isn’t just a narrow issue of tax policy. On the broader issue of privacy and government power, Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard makes some very strong points in a column for the South China Morning Post.

I should be a paid-up supporter of the campaign to close down tax havens. I should be glad to see the back of 500-euro bills. …Nevertheless, I am deeply suspicious of the concerted effort to address all these problems in ways that markedly increase the power of states – and not just any states but specifically the world’s big states – at the expense of both small states and the individual.

He cites two examples, starting with the intrusive plan in the U.K. to let anybody and everybody know the owners of property.

The British government announced it will set up a publicly accessible register of beneficial owners (the individuals behind shell companies). In addition, offshore shell companies and other foreign entities that buy or own British property will henceforth be obliged to declare their owners in the new register. No doubt these measures will flush out or deter some villains. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a foreign national to want to own a property in Britain without having his or her name made public. Suppose you were an apostate from Islam threatened with death by jihadists, for example.

…getting rid of bin Ladens is the thin end of a monetary wedge. …a number of economists…argue cash is an anachronism, heavily used in the black and grey economy, and easily replaced in an age of credit cards and electronic payments. But their motive is not just to shut down the mafia. It is also to increase the power of government. Without cash, no payment can be made without being recorded and potentially coming under official scrutiny. Without cash, central banks can much more easily impose negative interest rates, without fearing that bank customers may withdraw their money.

He’s right. The slippery slope is real. Giving governments some power invariably means giving governments a lot of power.

And that’s not a good idea if you’re a paranoid libertarian like me. But even if you have a more benign view of government, ask yourself if it’s a good idea to approve a global pact that is explicitly designed to help governments impose higher tax burdens?

Senators Paul and Lee are not allowing eight treaties to go forward without open debate and discussion. Seven of those pacts are bilateral agreements that easily could be tweaked and approved.

But the Protocol to the Multilateral Convention can’t be fixed. The only good outcome is defeat.

Imagine if you had the chance to play basketball against a superstar from the NBA like Stephen Curry.

No matter how hard you practiced beforehand, you surely would lose.

For most people, that would be fine. We would console ourselves with the knowledge that we tried our best and relish he fact that we even got the chance to be on the same court as a professional player.

But some people would want to cheat to make things “equal” and “fair.” So they would say that the NBA player should have to play blindfolded, or while wearing high-heeled shoes.

And perhaps they could impose enough restrictions on the NBA player that they could prevail in a contest.

But most of us wouldn’t feel good about “winning” that kind of battle. We would be ashamed that our “victory” only occurred because we curtailed the talents of our opponent.

Now let’s think about this unseemly tactic in the context of corporate taxation and international competitiveness.

So how does the Obama Administration want to address these problems? What’s their plan to reform the system to that American-based firms can better compete with companies from other countries?

Unfortunately, there’s no desire to make the tax code more competitive. Instead, the Obama Administration wants to change the laws to make it less attractive to do business in other nations. Sort of the tax version of hobbling the NBA basketball player in the above example.

The Administration proposes to supplement the existing subpart F regime with a per-country minimum tax on the foreign earnings of entities taxed as domestic C corporations (U.S. corporations) and their CFCs. …Under the proposal, the foreign earnings of a CFC or branch or from the performance of services would be subject to current U.S. taxation at a rate (not below zero) of 19 percent less 85 percent of the per-country foreign effective tax rate (the residual minimum tax rate). …The minimum tax would be imposed on current foreign earnings regardless of whether they are repatriated to the United States.

There’s a lot of jargon in those passages, and even more if you click on the underlying link.

So let’s augment by excerpting some of the remarks, at a recent Brookings Institution event, by the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs. Robert Stack was pushing the President’s agenda, which would undermine American companies by making it difficult for them to benefit from good tax policy in other jurisdictions.

He actually argued, for instance, that business tax reform should be “more than a cry to join the race to the bottom.”

In other words, he doesn’t (or, to be more accurate, his boss doesn’t) want to fix what’s wrong with the American tax code.

So he doesn’t seem to care that other nations are achieving good results with lower corporate tax rates.

I do not buy into the notion that the U.S. must willy-nilly do what everyone else is doing.

And he also criticizes the policy of “deferral,” which is a provision of the tax code that enables American-based companies to delay the second layer of tax that the IRS imposes on income that is earned (and already subject to tax) in other jurisdictions.

I don’t think it’s open to debate that the ability of US multinationals to defer income has been a dramatic contributor to global tax instability.

He doesn’t really explain why it is destabilizing for companies to protect themselves against a second layer of tax that shouldn’t exist.

But he does acknowledge that there are big supply-side responses to high tax rates.

The President’s global minimum tax proposal…permits tax-free repatriation of amounts earned in countries taxed at rates above the global minimum rate. …the global minimum tax plan also takes the benefit out of shifting income into low and no-tax jurisdictions by requiring that the multinational pay to the US the difference between the tax haven rate and the U.S. rate.

The bottom line is that American companies would be taxed by the IRS for doing business in low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Bermuda.

But if they do business in high-tax nations such as France, there’s no extra layer of tax.

The bottom line is that the U.S. tax code would be used to encourage bad policy in other countries.

Though Mr. Stack sees that as a feature rather than a bug, based on the preposterous assertion that other counties will grow faster if the burden of government spending is increased.

…the global minimum tax concept has an added benefit as well…protecting developing and low-income countries…so they can mobilize the necessary resources to grow their economies.

At a recent IMF symposium, the minimum tax was identified as something that could be of great help.

The bottom line is that the White House and the Treasury Department are fixated at hobbling competitors by encouraging higher tax rates around the world and making sure that American-based companies are penalized with an extra layer of tax if they do business in low-tax jurisdictions

For what it’s worth, the right approach, both ethically and economically, is for American policy makers to focus on fixing what’s wrong with the American tax system.

P.S. When I debunked Jeffrey Sachs on the “race to the bottom,” I showed that lower tax rates do not mean lower tax revenue.